As Sebastian Mares have practically finished accepting test results from participants I would like to offer for all who care to take part in alternative listening test with the same codec contenders but different sound samples. Testing methodology is also a bit different and makes testing much easier because sound artifacts are clearly audible in most cases. The main task of a listener is to grade annoyance of those artifacts.

Interesting to check out the comparisons at other bit rates... QDesign's mp2 encoder seems to beat LAME -V 0 --vbr-new in the 224 kbps range. But the diagram might be a bit misleading, I don't know how many people have taken the test.